Of course, Mr. Foxman is right. While the Palestinian Arab and other Arab representatives are busy making up "history" and complaining of the "Judaizing" of the Jewish city and eternal capital of Israel, Jersualem, they are also making any chance of a "Palestinian" state more and more remote. In other words, denial of Jewish history and ties to Israel and Jerusalem (a.k.a. denial of factual history) hurts, not helps the Palestinian Arab cause.

The Palestinian fantasy narrative Op-ed by Abraham Foxman

The Camp David meetings of 2000 involving President Bill Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat seemed at the time to offer the greatest hope yet for peace, and an end to the decades-old conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. When things ended in failure and then exploded into the second Intifada, a host of commentators, analysts and participants looked back to determine what went wrong.. . .he moment in the days-long discussions — as reported by several Israeli participants — that resonated with me as the signature event was a reported conversation between the two delegations. The Israelis proposed that the holiest site in Jerusalem to both sides — the Temple Mount to the Israelis, the spot of the Dome of the Rock to Muslims — would be shared, with some formula of mixed sovereignty or no sovereignty to be determined and agreed upon.

This was a courageous decision by Barak, who was drawing a lot of criticism back home for offering to give up some control over Israel’s holiest site. He believed, however, that for real peace, Israel would have to make significant and emotionally charged concessions. In effect, he was acknowledging what was essential for peace: a recognition by each that the other side had a legitimate narrative.

At that very moment of reaching out, the Palestinian response was reported to have been something along the following lines:

What are you talking about, this being a Jewish holy site? It is a fantasy concocted by you. All we see is the mosque on the mountain.

To which an Israeli representative appropriately pointed out that when Jesus was walking in Jerusalem 2000 years ago, as he looked up, he saw no mosques, nor even any church. All he saw was the Temple of the Jews on the Temple Mount.

In other words, at the very moment that Israel made clear that there were two narratives in Jerusalem, the Palestinians were rejecting any Jewish narrative.. . .

But the most egregious moment of “inventing history” at the Qatar conference — and there’s no evidence that Abbas or any other representative stood up to challenge its veracity — was a statement by the Emir of Qatar Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, who said: “Jerusalem has been an Arab city for the past 3,000 years.”

What is there to say after that? How, after all the years of trying to educate leaders that peace and security can only come when both sides accept the legitimacy of the other, can one avoid despairing about the process? Have the Palestinians learned nothing at all about the last six decades — that their unjust denial of Israel’s historic connection to the Holy Land and the legitimacy of the Jewish state has caused untold suffering to the Palestinian people themselves?

Trying to address Palestinian leaders directly about this seems like a hopeless proposition. So let me speak to others who claim to seek justice for the Palestinians. If that is truly your cause, then all your efforts should be directed toward transforming Palestinian thinking about history, about the need to recognize not only the presence of the Jewish state but the foundational connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. Absent that — and Abbas’s comments make clear that transformation has yet to occur — things will go on as they have.. . .

Reading the news, you would think that Mahmoud Abbas’s real first name is “The Moderate” and Benjamin Netanyahu’s real last name is “the Extremist.” Googling the words “Abbas” and “Moderate” yields 4.47 million hits, while “Netanyahu” and “Moderate” get 2.53 million hits. “Abbas” and “Extremism” yield 2.45 million hits while “Netanyahu” and “Extremism” produce 12.8 million. Although Googling is a gross indicator, it seems that the media is at least twice as likely to dub Abbas a “moderate” rather than Netanyahu, while Netanyahu is accused of “extremism” five to six times more frequently than Abbas is.

Yet sheer repetition of an assertion is not enough to make it true. Mahmoud Abbas is to moderation what moldy oranges are to penicillin. If purified properly, the product could be healing; but as it now stands, it is putrid and possibly toxic.. . .

When Abbas spoke, rather than injecting a note of responsibility into the proceedings, providing a reality check, he joined the anti-Israel pile on. He claimed Israel wants to “carry out continued excavations that threaten to undermine the Al-Aqsa Mosque, in order to extract evidence that supports the Israeli version of Judaism.” He said Israelis wanted to “Judaize” the city and “were preparing models of what they call the Temple in order to build on the ruins of Al Aqsa.”

Any one of these three incendiary ideas would earn an extremist street “cred” as a flamethrower. Few Israelis are proposing a Third Temple. Claiming “the Jews” wish to replace the Al-Aqsa Mosque with their own structure is a demagogic call for Arab rioting in Jerusalem and elsewhere. Second, mischievous phrases like “the Israeli version of Judaism” and “what they call the Temple,” try to rob Jews of our history, our legitimacy, our nationality. Abbas’s words echo longstanding Palestinian claims that Judaism is a religion with no peoplehood component, that the Temple never existed, and that the whole Zionist, meaning Jewish nationalist, project is a fraud.

Finally, Abbas’s allegations about “Judaizing” Jerusalem ignore the fact that Jerusalem is already Jewish and Muslim and Christian. Abbas’s implication, that Jews are engaged in ethnic cleansing, would require us to characterize modern Israelis as incompetent not just evil. Today’s Jerusalem has 800,000 residents, including 268,000 Arabs. In the nearly 45 years since the 1967 Six Day War, the Arab population has grown by 200,000, and many Arabs today appreciate their Israeli rights and services. The number of Arab Jerusalemites granted Israeli citizenship quadrupled from 2006 to 2010. If Israel is engaged in ethnic cleansing, Israelis would have to admit to being the worst – meaning the most ineffectual -- “ethnic cleansers” in history, having triggered a population increase due to higher quality of life including more freedom. (emphasis added)

. . .

Propagandists use the deep emotions the Heavenly Jerusalem stirs to further anger people while painting their distorted portrait of the Hellish Jerusalem. True moderates acknowledge complexity, see multiple dimensions, using the messiness of life to humanize and compromise rather than polarize. By ignoring the earthly Jerusalem, the mundane Jerusalem, day-to-day Jerusalem, Mahmoud Abbas once again failed to live up to his press clippings – disproving so many policy makers’ false perceptions of him as a peacemaker.